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Celebrating Temples

The LDS Church recently built two new temples in the Salt Lake Valley, one in Draper and one in South Jordan. We live just 5 miles from the one in South Jordan and that is the temple we’ll attend due to geography. Because there are two new temples opening, Church headquarters decided it would be fun to put on a “Temple Celebration” put on by the youth. There are 19,000 youth on church records within these two temple districts and they wanted every youth to participate. Well, they didn’t get that many; only about 11,000 are actually participating.

I am heavily involved because I’m the Young Men’s president in my ward and therefore I get to attend all the rehearsals, drive youth all over, and deal with all their logistics. The youth are broken up in to two groups: choir or dance. The oldest young men we have in our ward signed up to be in the dance, so I followed them and am a dance captain. While I won’t be performing with the group, I have learned all the steps because I’ve been out on the floor at rehearsals working with them. I know, you laugh. You should. I’ve got no dance talent — unlike my two youngest sisters.

Today, the choir group was short a few captains so I gave up my Saturday afternoon to drive a bunch of youth to downtown SLC to the Conference Center for their practice. We had about 2,000 youth there today all singing and performing. Since I’ve been in dance the whole time, I’ve never even heard their songs, so this was new for me. Our practice was three hours long in the Conference Center and I really enjoyed it. This will be such a great experience for the youth and I wish I had had an opportunity like this when I was a youngster.

We started rehearsals in March and we perform two weeks from tonight (Saturday, May 30). This has been very tiring and logistically challenging, but I see now just how rewarding it will be for everyone. The performance will be filmed, broadcast to every stake center in Utah, and the Prophet and many of the general authorities will be present for the performance. I’ll be glad when it’s over but I’m enjoying the ride.

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2 thoughts on “Celebrating Temples”

I am sure that is a ton of work, but the outcome is going to be so reewarding, like you said! I want to see you dance 🙂 You will have to post a video of you performing in your living room or something! Do you know what network it will be broadcasted on? Will it be BYU tv? Or just for stakes in Utah somehow?- Tana